Replacement of parts and equipment for industrial manufacturing, process and control systems, herein referred to individually as an industrial plant, has traditionally been carried out by referring to information held in a maintenance system database of some sort. Parts of an industrial plant include for example pumps, valves, heating systems, robots, control systems, motors, drives for control systems, and other products used in industry, including for example the food industry, heavy and light manufacturing industries, oil and gas extraction and refining, chemical processes, mining, electrical generation, transport and distribution systems.
For many years it has been common practice for major manufacturing companies to communicate with customers and suppliers by means of computerised documents conforming to a standard known as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). This standard is described in United Nations standards including EDIFACT and in US American National Standards Committee (ANSII) standards relating to EDI including Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12 standards for EDI. EDI has been characterised by expensive proprietary software, often custom software and complex, non standard implementation. With the emergence of the World Wide Web companies have begun to use user-friendly, open-standard, relatively inexpensive Web-browser technologies for purchasing by consumers, or Business to Consumer, so called B2C, and for purchasing by other corporate entities, or Business-to-Business, so called B2B. Within B2B the use of computerised customer-supplier communication in so-called e-procurement operations is expanding rapidly. For example e-procurement exchanges, or e-marketplaces, have recently been expanding in number; examples include Marrakech (www.marrakech.com), Ariba (www.ariba.com) and Buzzsaw (www.buzzsaw.com).
Standards for e-procurement transactions have been developed by the RosettaNet forum, see for example document “PIP3A1: Request Quote”, Beta 01.00.00B, RosettaNet, 22 May 2000, which describes a standardised set of purchaser-supplier interaction processes for transmitting and responding to Request for Quotes (RFQs).
International patent application WO 99/19819, applied for by Intelisys Electronic Commerce, describes an electronic commerce system enabling corporate purchasers and suppliers to electronically transact, in e-procurement operations, for the purchase and supply of goods and services.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,960,411, issued to Amazon.com, Inc., describes a method to order a product over the Internet. In particular, the method and systems disclosed include method steps and computerised means to store details about an existing customer, associated with customer identification means such as a cookie, so that during future purchases the customer can purchase other products with a single “1-click” action, without having to re-enter address details identifying the customer. The method however discloses only how consumer products, principally products that the consumer does not already possess or have control over, may be purchased over the Internet.